Warren Report

What Hillary Clinton Got Wrong About Fox News

Hillary Clinton tends to hate the press in a bipartisan fashion. She's got reason to be suspicious, given the battering she's taken over several decades. But she's now gone a bit far in her own macro communication analysis.

“Unfortunately our body politic's immune system has been impaired because there has been a concerted effort starting with the creation of the Fox network—it wasn't there when Bill first ran, it was one of the reasons he probably survived, it was there when he ran the second time—it and all of the associated media outlets who are by no means delivering news. They are delivering partisan advocacy positions irrespective of the truth, the facts, the evidence,” Clinton said at a Clinton-era reunion in Little Rock, Arkansas, that celebrated the 25th anniversary of his 1992 election win.

Ah, seriously? No mention of her spouse having been impeached, Fox News or no Fox News (it started in 1996) or an economy that helped him a whole lot, especially when he won reelection in 1996. No mention of the rather virulent attacks on his female accusers back in the day.

Jeffrey Seglin, a policy and ethics expert at Harvard's Kennedy School, says, “I’m not sure Fox gets to decide who survives and who doesn’t survive. Trump survived because he got voted in to office. Clinton survived because a Democratic Senate didn’t convict him once he was impeached.” But lying does have consequences, as he wrote in this long-ago (1998) piece in The New York Times, which focused on the act of dancing about the truth by Clinton and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates during a deposition in a big antitrust case.

“After the impeachment, I was on CNBC talking with Maria Bartiromo about the Super Bowl halftime show with Timberlake and Jackson and what might happen if it turned out CBS or MTV knew about what was going to happen with the wardrobe malfunction before it happened. Martha Stewart’s dance with the truth was mentioned and so was Clinton. Bartiromo observed that things didn’t turn out so bad for Clinton, to which I responded, 'Unless you count the impeachment.' I’m sure this is on tape somewhere, along with the split screen of my head next to repeated showing of the malfunctioning event.”

You can point to the dramatic increase in conservative media clout in the 1980s and 1990s, perhaps best exemplified by the coming of talk radio and Rush Limbaugh. And the coming of influential conservative think tanks and the potency of op-ed columnists like George Will (nobody was much bigger if you didn't count cartoonists and Ann Landers). But that doesn't mean that Fox was a game changer of the sort Hillary Clinton implies.

“It’s too pat and unidimensional,” says University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. “A presidential win or loss is the confluence of dozens of factors, but mainly the fundamentals. Bill won in 1992 and 1996 mainly because the economy was bad in the earlier year and good when he came up for re-election. And if Fox mattered so much, how could Gore have managed the late surge that won him the popular vote and almost the election?”

“Very few people are movable in this hyper-partisan era. Maybe what Fox does is energize the GOP base and increase the conservative turnout.”

“It’s a good question,” says Andrew Rudalevige, a Bowdoin College political scientist. “Bill Clinton saw relatively unified public opinion in his corner, in fact his highest approval rating came just around the time the Senate was voting on whether to remove him from office. The GOP lost seats in the 1998 elections—at the time, the first time a president’s own party had gained seats in a midterm since 1934.”

“So the question is whether in a Fox News world, pushing Clinton’s evils 24/7, would have driven down Clinton’s approval, making it impossible for any Republican identifier in the general public to support him and making it much harder for Republican lawmakers to cross over. Maybe.”

“Then again, the impeachment/removal votes were pretty much party-line votes anyway (the Senate vote less so than the House, of course.) Would Fox have convinced Dems to cross over? Probably the opposite.”

So you can firmly believe that Hillary Clinton herself has been the target of much unfounded criticism. Indeed, historians may wonder about all the attention given her campaign-long email “scandal.” But her assumptions about Fox gives it rather too much credit.

Why the Justice Department may be right in trying to upend AT&T-Time Warner deal

Donald Trump's tweets and free-floating media bashing, including his unceasing derision of CNN, may blind some in the media to good reasons for the the Department of Justice to try to stop the big merger. As Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Georgetown Law Center puts it, “DOJ and AT&T dispute who raised the prospect requiring the divestiture of the Turner programming aspects. However, once that happened, AT&T quickly spread the word that it had been asked to sell off CNN. This garnered a lot of sympathy from reporters who aren't usually on the highly specialized media and antitrust beats. They were quite willing to believe that this case was politically motivated. In fact, there are strong legal and policy reasons for this case.”

Such as?

“AT&T can leverage its control of (Time-Warner) content, especially live news and sports, by withholding it from competitors or charging them higher prices than it charges itself.”

Randall Stephenson, the AT&T boss with grandiose plans, would like to spin this a test of the rule of law and a First Amendment issue. That's likely not how it will be decided. He's got some decisions to make about dumping assets.

If it's Tuesday, it must be time to reveal that (fill in the name) is accused of sexual misconduct at the workplace. Monday it was Charlie Rose and Glenn Thrush, the New York Times correspondent. Stephanie Ruhle, who worked on Wall Street before MSNBC, was especially good on Brian Williams's late-evening show, while earlier I found myself in agreement with Monica Crowley, the conservative pundit and long-ago Richard Nixon aide, on Fox.

The point was simple and perhaps lost in the fray: there are very different levels of bad behavior, none really defensible, and it's best not to lump in drunk idiots, say, with predators. And the problem is going to get a whole lot more publicity before it gets less. And that's good. Ultimately, it's about powerful people more than gender and the lure of controlling others are not subsiding anytime soon.

Oh, here's CBS News' solid piece on the Rose mess. The New York Timespiece on Thrush includes this anecdote: “Vox published its article just after 10:30 a.m. on Monday, when reporters and editors in the Times’s Washington bureau were attending a weekly news meeting. The meeting came to a halt as everyone stopped to read the article, according to one person who was present.”

Feeding a “fake news” narrative

The Washington Post'sCallum Borchers notes in a de facto smart parenthetical of a story, “While this is hardly the most important consideration at a time when more and more women are coming forward with accounts of predatory behavior by men in power, it is worth noting a negative side effect of the allegations against Rose, Thrush and other prominent media figures such as former NPR top editor Mike Oreskes and former ABC politics director Mark Halperin: The notion that these men successfully misled many colleagues and the public about their true natures feeds the 'fake news' narrative pushed by President Trump, U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore and others.”

A backlash against Lena Dunham's defense of a colleague accused of misconduct

Friends, associates and bosses can wind up in tricky positions when sexual harassment or outright assault claims are made. “Though Lena Dunham has previously spoken about her belief that women do not lie about rape, she changed course to stand by Girls writer Murray Miller when he was accused of sexual assault, and people were not thrilled with her,” writes Allure.

Meanwhile, Daily Beast inspects the case of "Transparent" actor Jeffrey Tanbor's rancorous exit, where he seems have doubled down on allegations made against him. Kevin Fallon argues, "Tambor’s exit is an intriguing and complicated test case when it comes to how the industry and the media respond to the spate of sexual-harassment allegations. What are we to make of his departure? Is it a victory? Is it hasty? Will it affect the quality of the show?"

"And in terms of the catalyst for his leaving—the allegations made against him—it raises questions about how we in the media react to these social media accusations. In an era of believe all women, does that extend to the media, where incredulity is held up as our biggest virtue? Or is reactionary justice for the often-silenced a higher virtue?"

Masha Gessen on Al Franken

Remember Al Franken? That seems so long ago, What nearly two, three days? The issue, writesThe New Yorker's Gessen, is "the power imbalance that allows some men to take women hostage using sex. Franken, from what we know, was not such a man. When he kissed Tweeden without her consent, during a rehearsal on a U.S.O. tour, she was able to, according to her description, push her assailant away, tell him, 'Don’t ever do that to me again,' and walk away—hurt and disgusted, to be sure, but not in fear for her future."

Continues Gessen, who just won the National Book Award for nonfiction for The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, a dissection of the rise of Vladimir Putin, Tweeden wrote that she didn't go public back then "because she 'didn’t want to cause trouble,' and didn’t feel that she needed protection from Franken. On the way back from the tour, Franken posed for a picture in which he pretended to grope Tweeden’s breasts when she fell asleep on a plane. More than a decade later, when Tweeden decided to go public, he apologized. 'The apology, sure, I accept it,' Tweeden said in a press conference. “People make mistakes.” She sounded less magnanimous than annoyed. She explained that she had decided to go public in order to encourage other women to speak up without fear. That matters. Whether Franken resigns does not."

Two "hot" books from journalists

At the top of the National Book Review's "hot" list is photographer Pete Souza's blockbuster on President Obama but also a new effort by author and Vanity Fair editor Cullen Murphy,Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe. They're both friends of mine, so congratulations, guys. Murphy's dad did the long-running Prince Valiant strip and this is an account of a very creative bunch of chums who mostly lived near one another in Connecticut.

On Souza's photos

One might wonder about the rights to the 1.9 million photos by Souza during his eight years covering Obama. He used 300 for his book. In all, the photo operation he oversaw took 4 million shot.

As a National Archives source informs, those photos are covered under the Presidential Records Act as Presidential Records and not available to the public for at least five years. The act has special

Access provisions for former administration officials and Souza worked out approval for this access and use.

The photos are all in the public domain, as were, for example, the famous Ansel Adams Snake River photos and Mathew Brady's Civil War photos. Once they do become available to the public, folks can do with them whatever they desire.

Tina Brown on Facebook, Google

Talking to Kara Swisher on a Recode podcast, the former editor of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Talk and Daily Beast says, "I am very angry and upset about the way advertising revenue has been essentially pirated by the Facebook-Google world, without nearly enough giveback — no giveback, really — to the people who create those brilliant pieces that are posted all over their platforms. It’s high time they gave back to journalism.”

She suggests a ginormous "journalism fund” for local media, but knows it's unlikely. “They have no interest, I realize that. It’s like, ‘Oh, we’re not a media company, we’re a platform.’ Okay, well, guess what? When you don’t have human beings who have judgment, who have taste, who have a sense of responsibility, you can have any old Russian hacker dishing it out to the American public.”

The decline of department stores

Here's a good Bloomberg video overview that underscores how it's too simplistic to blame online shopping for their decline. Yes, that's part of it. But just one part. They're struggling under assault from off-price retailers, like Marshall's, who don't do much if any e-commerce; the decline in a younger generation's interest in their beauty counters (opting for chains like Sephora); and mega brands like Ralph Lauren and Michael Kors souring on them.

Bottom line: they need to close more stores, focus on ones in heavily trafficked area and vastly improve the consumer experience.

Good reads of the morning

From STAT: "In early November, after 84-year-old Dr. Anna Konopka voluntarily gave up her license so that the New Hampshire Board of Medicine wouldn’t suspend it, she went to court so she could get it back. The Board told her it had concerning evidence that called her abilities as a physician into question, but she wonders if other factors, including her refusal to adopt electronic health records, might be at play. She's of a kind of medicine that’s all but extinct. She works alone in a cottage next to her house, rarely uses a computer, and doesn’t take insurance. Instead, she charges each patient $50 cash for an office visit or a house call. In the fight to get her license back, she’s also become the face of a debate about how to best ensure that older doctors are providing the most up-to-date care."

From Boston.com: A 9-year-old Maine cancer patient whose story went viral after he asked for early Christmas cards has died.

In a Facebook post Monday morning, Jacob Thompson’s family shared that he “passed away peacefully” on Sunday after a four-year battle with neuroblastoma, a pediatric cancer. Jacob, of Saco, was admitted to Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital in Portland on October 11, according to a GoFundMe campaign set up by his mother, Michelle Thompson Simard. His parents were told he would likely not make it to the holidays. After he asked for cards so he could celebrate early, thousands poured in from strangers, including celebrities Anna Kendrick and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as the New England Patriots.

A Trump timeline that bends toward the horizon

From The Undefeated: "TRUMP VS. THE WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS: A TIMELINE. The president’s comments about Stephen Curry as well as the NFL are just the latest in a long and combative, but sometimes cozy relationship between Trump and sports."

Oh, my gosh, he really has spent a lot of time over the years bashing, and sucking up to, the sports establishment. Justin Tinsley catalogues it all (one hopes there's not anything he's missed, this is so long).

The Morning Babel

Immigration was the hot topic on Trump & Friends and "CNN's New Day, with with an attack on border agents consuming the former and the issue of Trump ending protected status for Haitian immigrants the priority at the latter. It was then off to sex allegations of the day, be they involving Charlie Rose or Roy Moore.

MSNBC's Morning Joe turned to its default position of going after Roy Moore and Trump's passivity on the topic. Joe Scarborough calls it right-wing "tribalism" that manifests itself in voting against the Clintons or the Obamas in one fashion or another, along the way some treating Trump as a de facto god to follow. And Mika Brzezinski made all the right points about the role of spineless managers---both female and male---who've taken a dive on this issue through the years at many workplaces. It did not spend much time on the situation of Glenn Thrush, an MSNBC regular, at one point referring to an unidentified "New York Times reporter."

"We just can't go after the people we don't like," she said. "We have to go after the whole culture." It's a rather complicated matter that involves more nuts and bolts work over coming years at any business than many perhaps realize. Words of outrage in the public arena by Brzezinski and others will get the press and other industries only so far. Still, one component is ending conspiracies of silence and, here, she heralded the person who runs Rose's interview operation (a female) who is now publicly contrite for not coming forward way earlier about Rose. Folks at her shop knew.

Meanwhile, what names will we hear about today?

Corrections? Tips? Please email me: jwarren@poynter.org. Would you like to get this roundup emailed to you every morning? Sign up here.